Nowhere Girl (2 page)

4

This is my last walk down the hall, the long hall from Chief Warden's office and up the stairs to our cell block. The prison feels crooked around me, seeing it as I am for the last time. It's like I'm a cut-out paper girl stuck back on top of the page where I started, but I don't fit anymore. The edges are all wrong.

Voices call to me from the cells I pass. Women reach out their hands, some women I know well and others I don't. They croon and coo and brush their fingers over me, this little bit of prison that is heading out to the world. They want to touch this bird that is about to fly free, like maybe some bit of their touch, too, will go out there and see the world. Feel the world. So some part of them can live again.

But I am no bird and I have no wings. I've only got a big empty spot inside me where once I had a mother, once I had a home, and now there's nothing.

Bibi and Jeanne are out on work duty, and I am alone when I enter the cell. I drop onto Mama's bunk, reach underneath, and pull out the small clay jar that holds her ashes. It is dull and unpainted, and if I stretched my fingers wide around it the tips would almost touch. But I can't seem to open my hands. They are stiff and tight and cold, and through their shaking I can hear the rattle of the little clay lid.

Even after all these weeks I can hardly bear to hold this jar. How can such a small container be all that is left of my mama? What about everything that made her alive … where did all that go? What about the pale yellow hair that spread like a spiky fan on her pillow every night? What about her big wide dance steps as she spun me round and round the cell? And what about her smile, what about her laugh, what about her jump and her spark and the way she
was
that would never, never fit in a secondhand clay jar in a forgotten jail cell somewhere in northern Thailand? How could one urn ever hold her?

Standing, I pull the sheet from the bed, bunch the faded cloth, and lift it to my face. Despite many washings, there are still traces of her. For long seconds I just stand there, filling my lungs with the familiar, comforting smell. Then I clench my hands and set my jaw. I rip the sheet all the way down the middle, a long, hollow sound that is like the breaking of my heart. I rip until all the feeling inside me is consumed in this one motion, over and over and over. Finally I'm left with a pile of ragged yellowish strips.

I pick up the first strip and begin to wind it around the urn. One wrap for safekeeping. One for warmth. One for guidance. I wrap and I twist until the urn is lost in folds of faded bedding.

Now, if I don't look too closely, this rough-shaped ball might be something else completely. It might not be my mama at all.

There is a groan from the door behind me, and I turn to see Bibi, her glassy eyes on the bundle in my hands. I set it on the bed and fall into her arms.

As far back as I can remember it's been us four in the cell: Bibi from the northern province of Phayao; Jeanne from the exotic, faraway city of Paris; Mama and me from America. Bibi was my playmate, a wide warm woman with a ready smile and a heart that hugged the world. I never knew what brought her inside, but whatever it was, I don't believe it. My Bibi taught me games and poems, and told me long stories in Thai that first lulled me to sleep, then awakened me on the inside, then sent my imagination off places I never knew existed. Safe inside my walls, I traveled the world.

Jeanne was thin and sharp as a switchblade, but she had the mind of a scientist. She could be cold, and usually was, but she took it upon herself to grow my brain. Sums and equations, formulas and calculations … It was like she was shucking off on me all the knowledge that had gotten stuck in her head over the course of her life.

Everyone knew what Jeanne was inside for, though apparently no one thought I was old enough to hear it. It had to do with knives and explosives, but that's as much as I could get out of anybody. Anyway, it didn't matter, not really. That's the thing about life on the inside: whatever you were before matters less and less as time goes on. Inmates craft their own worlds, build empires and elect rulers and live their lives, as though everything that happened before never was at all.

Of course, most people have
had
a before. I've always felt like a monkey in the middle—a saying I once read in a book and never forgot because it fit me so well: American but not American, Thai but not really Thai. Where do I belong, with my pale skin, my corn-silk hair, my stone-gray eyes? How can I call any country my own?

Now Bibi holds me tight and strokes my hair, like she has ever since I can remember. I'm not sure whether my leaving will be harder on me or on her, but we both know it has to be.

I dry my eyes and offer her a wan smile.

“You are ready,” she says, and I nod, squeezing her hands hard. Moving back toward the bed, I set down my tea box and pick up the bundle that holds the urn. I loosen and stretch part of the wrapping, yank the knot tight, and pull it over my shoulder like a carry-bag. Then I glance under the bunk at my belongings.

Skirts and pants and T-shirts. Sarongs. A doll I twisted out of green palm leaves. The school supplies of my childhood: the Merriam-Webster dictionary that I read and recited every day for two years until it was as familiar as my fingernails;
Principles of Mathematics
, the advanced edition, but no longer advanced for me;
The Complete Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
in French, courtesy of Jeanne. There are other books, too, history and philosophy and art, and one very special book. It's a worn, illustrated story of
Cinderella
, with a gold-curlicued cover and heavy, old-fashioned images. I dreamed myself into those paintings every night of my childhood, and soaked up the words nearly every day. It's closer to me than my own name.

But even that now feels like too much.

Because suddenly I'm not sure I can go on being myself, while trying to do what's now ahead of me. I don't know how to be someone else, but I also know that the girl I was cannot exist outside the support of these walls.

No, I decide. I can't bear to hold on to these things from my old life. They have no place in my new one. I shove the box back under the bed.

With a last hug for my beloved second mother, I turn and leave my cell for the last time.

5

The prison gates clang shut behind me. The last guard retreats inside the block.

I am alone.

As I step out into the world, I feel it wobble around me. The wind blows down from the mountains, heavy with monsoon rain that has not yet fallen, even though we are near the brink of June. The clouds glower overhead, thick and strong as the prison gates at my back. But neither of them open for me. They just loom and look and do not move.

The road is dusty and the pavement is cracked, but I soon reach the spot where I am to meet Kiet the nephew. It's a faded gray bench by a post where a bus used to stop once, long ago. I drop onto the bench, clutching my tea box. I look around at this vast sweeping place, the world, and wonder what magic normal people see in it.

Emptiness, that's all I can see right now. Roads that lead to the mountains, mountains that scrape the sky. It's all strange and huge and wild. Of course, I have seen it all before, but that wasn't me; that was a girl with my same name, some creature of mud and bone who had never felt the lick of true freedom on her skin.

I still remember the first time I left the prison. How old was I—six? Seven? Isra spent weeks building me up to the big event, telling me stories of things we'd see and do, sneaking in tasty treats and telling me how much more there was “out there,” walking me round and round the courtyard, pointing at distant spots and telling me what things were hiding just out of sight.

But when the gate creaked open and then shut behind me, and I looked back at Mama behind those bars, waving at me with her bright painted smile, I didn't know what all the fuss was about. Everyone seemed to be holding their breath, like they thought this trip might be too much for me. I just waved, and everyone sighed and went back to their day. And Isra sat me on the back of her bicycle and we rode off toward all those hidden things waiting to be discovered.

I didn't understand what I'd just done, not then. It took a little longer to realize that those of us on the inside couldn't just open the gates and walk out anytime we wanted. And once I did understand that, even though I still enjoyed the trips to the market and the overnight stays with Isra's family, it wasn't the same. Something inside me felt out of step after that. Some part of me knew I didn't fully belong in the real world.

Until now.

Because all those times going out with Isra are like rice paper to the silk of this now. Always, always before there was a tug in my belly, like a cord winding back to my cell, something inside me that could only rest behind the bars I called home. Now the cord has been cut, and the world outside is not the same one I traveled through before.

My legs are shaking so hard the old bench is starting to tremble in sympathy. I don't want this freedom, yet some part of it pulls at me. Does freedom have a taste? A smell? What is this tug that fights with my fear? I look away from the gates—and then I see my tree. How many nights I studied that gnarled tree from my cell—but how different it looks now, from here, as it squats lonesome in the midday sun. It should look bigger close up, but it doesn't. It looks small and stunted and weak. How will it ever weather the coming storm?

A cool breeze rushes down from the mountain and tosses my hair up off my forehead. And suddenly I know that freedom does have a smell. It is high and strong and sharp. It smells like danger. It smells alone. It is everything that is in the push of the air, right now, as the countryside waits for the great rain. Any moment now we will slide fast into flood and torrent.

The rain is late this year, but it has to come soon. And I am afraid that the longer it is held back, the harder it will fall.

I don't know if my tree will survive what is ahead.

6

There's a roar sawing through my silence for a long time before I see the thing that passes for a car in these parts. I may have grown up in a country prison in northern Thailand, but even I can tell that these four wheels should not be on the road. I think the car was red once, but that's just a guess.

The thing grinds to a stop, then has a coughing fit right in front of me, and the back left wheel falls off. The driver's door opens, slams shut, and a brisk skinny guy bursts into action all over the car. Kiet is busy with tools so shiny that either they've never been used before or they've yet to have a minute's rest. I have a feeling I know which. He is prying and lifting and poking and prodding, and meanwhile he jerks his head in my direction and calls to me in Thai.

I go a few steps closer. Kiet looks different than he did inside the prison. Out here, surrounded by sky and the wild world, he looks alien. My mind knows that I am safe with him, this nephew of my warden's, this boy I have known since before I could walk, but my pounding heart says I am getting into the car with a stranger.

I concentrate on what I know, to keep away the fear. Kiet is twenty and has lived in Bangkok for the last four years. He sends money back to his family, but prison gossip says he is there for the good life more than anything else. That he has become a city dweller. It has been a long time since the days we sat and played tic-tac-toe in white chalk on the prison floor. He is a boy I have known through the bars but now he is a man and I am not sure I know him anymore.

But he is heading back to Bangkok, with his car, and I have to admit the timing is excellent. Since I could be walking those seven hundred kilometers, I'm willing to live with my unease.

The car, too, is strange up close. I've read all about them in my old set of encyclopedias, and I've seen them on the little television set the guards put on for us sometimes in the evenings. Often, too, while out walking or riding on the back of Isra's bicycle I watched these metal beasts roar by. I always tried not to flinch, telling myself I had seen them many times and I knew all there was to know.

But here is what I now understand: seeing is different from knowing. What I have read about in my books and what I can touch with my hands are two very different things. I am afraid of this car and I am afraid of this big, strange world where I am now meant to belong.

Yet it's far too late to turn back.

After a few minutes Kiet looks in my direction, but then the stick that's supposed to be holding up the car cracks and the whole thing crashes down near his foot. He swears and gets back to work, and then I hear my name called out from behind me. From back inside the gates.

Something rises inside me like a mad joyful scream, and for a second I know, I just know that it's Mama standing there with that little scowl in between her eyebrows, wondering what took me so long to find her. I rocket back the way I came and throw myself at the gate.

But it's not Mama. Of course it's not; how can it be, when Mama is wrapped in bedsheet strips and tied around my neck? Still, it takes me a second to crash down from my high, dreamy place. I force myself to slow my breathing and smooth out my crooked expression, looking up at Jeanne, who stands behind the barred gate with eyes that tell me everything I don't want to hear.

We have always walked a narrow ledge, Jeanne and I, some fine boundary between resentment and grudging acceptance. She doled out equations and formulas like they were my due for taking up space in her world. And while I have chosen to hate the calculus rather than hating Jeanne, still I cannot ignore her altogether. But I will not let her see how she affects me.

I concentrate on keeping my breath level so nothing shows on my face. But Jeanne droops like a melting candle. I am surprised, and for a second my mask flickers. She reaches through the gate and, after a second's hesitation, I put out my right hand to touch hers.

I feel it right away—the sheet of paper folded up so small it's like an extra flap of skin on her palm. The paper is thin and damp and I wonder if it's really there or if I'm just dreaming it.

“
Tiens, prends ça
,” Jeanne says, and rattles on in French, telling me that this letter was sent to Mama years ago and Mama threw it out, but Jeanne found it and kept it because she is funny like that and has feelings about stuff that will be important, and now with the way things are she wants me to have it and who knows, it might be useful.

I swallow and cram my hand inside my pocket, then leave it there because I don't want to let go yet of that bit of Mama she tried so hard not to keep. I nod and start to turn away, but then Jeanne lunges forward, grabs my shoulder through the bars, and tugs at me. My cheek is up against the rusty metal and I can taste iron flecks on my tongue, but Jeanne holds on hard. I feel her breath on my earlobe. She is whispering fast and urgent.

“Listen careful,
ma petite
, I have to tell you something important. You know your
maman
had her ups and downs, yes?”

I wrench my shoulder from her grasp and pull my chin out of the gatework. My breath catches in my throat, but I make my voice steady. “Yes, what about it?” Mama's moods were legendary, long circuits from a pitch-black despair that slowly got better and better until I always thought this time, surely, everything would be okay. And then something would happen—I never knew what—to send her crashing back down, and the process would begin all over again.

Jeanne turned her head and looked to either side of herself, then lowered her voice further. “It was all because of her computer searches.”

I looked at her blankly.

“Twice a year, they give us computer privileges. You know. I got them, and so did she. And one year, I notice something. I start watching Helena and observing what she does.”

“Why? Why would you watch her?”

“
Quelle imbecile
, even you did not realize? Her black moods always started after her time on the computer. Then the weeks and months go by, she becomes happier, you think maybe she hopes again, yes? She starts to look out the window, talk about returning with you someday to America, yes? Then she goes on the computer, and her mood is midnight again.”

I swallow. “I don't understand. What does that mean?”

Jeanne snorts. “I find out for you what it means. I pay off one of the guards, and here is what I learn—a long time ago I learn this, but what good would it ever do to say anything? Except now.” She swallows. “Now you are leaving and who knows, maybe it will help you.”

I can feel sweat pooling on my palms and my heart hammering in my chest. I want to be away, far away from Jeanne and her schemes and manipulations. But nothing would move me from this spot.

“Every six months, your
maman
goes for her time on the Internet, and she looks up just one website. One place only she goes, the same every time: Payne Industries.”

I wait, but Jeanne is silent now. “That's it? Payne Industries? What does that mean?”

“I don't know what it means, you fool. Only that it means something to your mother, and now I have told it to you, and I have done my duty.
C'est assez
. It is enough.”

I'm still looking into her ice-blue eyes, trying to figure out what she means by all of this, if she really is trying to help me or if she has some other motive I don't understand, when Isra comes up behind Jeanne and taps her on the shoulder. With a shrug, Jeanne turns and walks back toward the cell block. Another part of my life that is gone forever. In spite of everything, I know I will miss her rough, grudging care.

And I don't even know what she has left me with. I file away my new knowledge to ponder at a later time and I smile at Isra, who reaches for me through the bars.

“I will miss you, little light,” Isra says. I've been teaching her English, and she likes to practice with me. She's quite good, though she never believes me when I tell her. “We all will miss you. But you will do well in the world outside. Keep your head up and be strong.”

I nod and try to smile because she wants me to, but I know my mouth looks like an old crumpled sock.

She's holding a black nylon duffel. “You forgot your things. I brought them to you. Your clothes and books and everything.”

She slides open the zipper and there are my belongings, the ones I left under the bunk. I feel my breath catch in my throat. It was a split-second decision to leave it all behind, but from this side of the rusted iron gate I can hardly recognize those things. I can never belong to them again.

She starts to squeeze the bag through the bars and I find my voice.

“
Mai ao na kha
,” I say, shaking my head and choking on my words because I want so badly for her to understand. “I don't want any of that stuff. It's not me anymore. I don't need it.”

She doesn't understand, but how can I tell her that I am a worm born in a cave, that I need to grow my own wings in order to fly? How can I say that the girl who lived in cell block 413 and scrawled spelling words on the walls, who could conjugate verbs in three languages but who couldn't look up to follow a hawk's path across the sky, how can I make her see that girl is no longer me? These clothes belonged to that other person, but they have no part in my new journey. For this voyage I have other belongings, other clothing: the blanket of fear, the scarf of loneliness, the dark cloak of secrets. I have no room for anything else.

I'm saved from finding words by the roar of the engine behind me. Kiet's repairs have worked at last. Isra sighs in defeat and shoves a handful of
baht
at me. “Take this money at least,” she says, and I can see she really means it, so after a second's pause, I do. My dollars will be of no use for getting around Bangkok, and I am grateful for her kindness.

I look hard into Isra's eyes, and the world stops. I see her younger, smiling, dancing with a tiny straw-haired girl, crooning
luk thung
ballads in my little ear. I see her drawing a
Tang Te
outline on the cement floor in chalk, showing me how to hop skillfully from one square to another, picking up the stone without ever putting my foot down. I see her head bent over my fifth-grade reader as she sounds out the words and tries to keep up with my translation in her halting English.

She has been a part of everything I've ever known. But now she is a part of my past.

My eyes smile and my hand that is still holding hers, with the money squashed inside, grasps on tightly. Then I let go, and I turn, and I don't say anything because since the day my mama left without saying it,
good-bye
is a word that no longer exists for me.